I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

I thought the conclusion should have been obvious: A cluster of Raspberry Pi units is an expensive nerd indulgence for fun, not an actual pathway to high performance compute. I don’t know if anyone building a Pi cluster actually goes into it thinking it’s going to be a cost effective endeavor, do they? Maybe this is just YouTube-style headline writing spilling over to the blog for the clicks.

If your goal is to play with or learn on a cluster of Linux machines, the cost effective way to do it is to buy a desktop consumer CPU, install a hypervisor, and create a lot of VMs. It’s not as satisfying as plugging cables into different Raspberry Pi units and connecting them all together if that’s your thing, but once you’re in the terminal the desktop CPU, RAM, and flexibility of the system will be appreciated.

Geerling's titles have been increasingly click-bait for a while now. It's pretty sad, because I like his content, but hate the click-bait BS.

If it makes an appreciable difference to how much money he makes on YouTube then I can’t begrudge him for doing it.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Just to add context — I've been experimenting on my 2nd channel (Level 2 Jeff) with titles that are straight/barebones exactly describing the content of the video, vs a slight bit of clickbait (never untrue, but certainly more intriguing and not describing the exact topic of the video).

The ones that are dead straight with no clickbait are 10/10 (the worst performers), and usually by a massive margin. Even with the same thumbnail.

The sad fact is, if you want your work seen on YouTube, you can't just say "I built a 10 node Raspberry Pi blade cluster and ran HPL and LLMs on it".

Some people are fine with a limited audience. And that's fine too! I don't have to write on my blog at all—I earn negative income from that, since I pay for hosting and a domain, but I hope some people enjoy the content in text form like I do.